Yesterday was another big day for aerial warfare (these
headlines are from The Times, 4). Six hundred and fifty
German aircraft attacked RAF aerodromes in south-east
England; forty-six were shot down and the raids repulsed.
Only thirteen British aircraft were lost. London had more
air-raid warnings during the day but suffered nothing worse
than that.

As of today, Britain has been at war for a year. The first
leading article marks this anniversary with a sweeping survey
of the war to date. In many ways it has been a surprising
war: Popular anticipation pictured war primarily in…

This color film of the Japanese Surrender was taken on 2
September 1945 by Commander George F. Kosco, USN. In 2010,
the Kosco family restored the film and kindly presented the
NHHC with a copy of the film. Original film is silent….

Today is the 85th anniversary of the day in 1925 when the
first intended flight from California to Hawaii stopped being
a flight and became a sea voyage. CDR John Rodgers and a crew
of four left San Pedro on 31 August but developed fuel
problems and landed their PN-9 seaplane on the water. While
[…]…

The Manchester Guardian sums up the weekend’s raids above
(5). Eighty-five enemy aircraft were shot down on Saturday,
and another twenty-five yesterday. British losses on those
days were thirty-seven and fifteen, respectively. The
headlines make for reassuring reading: ‘Raiders baffled in
attacks on aerodromes’, ‘Raiders scattered on way to London’,
‘Nazis lose 700 airmen in a week’. And ‘More bombs on
Berlin’. On behalf of the War Cabinet, Churchill has written
a letter to the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command to
congratulate his force on its work in bombing Germany and
Italy. He made special mention…

In the next couple of weeks I will be attending a couple of
interesting Air Power related events. First, on 23 September
I will be delivering a paper at the first Air Power Studies
Postgraduate Symposium at the University of Birmingham. I
will be delivering a paper about my thesis project and
discussing some of […]…

The New Statesman was a little off in its belief that the
Germans have given up ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics, as yesterday they
renewed their heavy daylight assaults against RAF aerodromes.
According to the Observer (above, 7) they also targeted
‘women shoppers’ in two places near or in London. On page 8,
there’s a handy map to help readers keep track of the
strategy of the ‘Battle of Britain’ — the hatched areas are
the ‘principal industrial areas’ in each country. Germany is
now known to have moved a large part of her air force to
advanced bases in occupied territory in order…

31 August marks the establishment by Congress of the U S Navy
Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in 1842. Up to this time, all
aspects of Naval operations were handled out of the office of
the Secretary of the Navy, or by a general Board of
Commissioners. Increasingly sophisticated technology however,
called for concentration of expertise in discrete areas, and
so Congress created the “Bureau System” for managing the
Navy’s activities. These concentrated expertise under
specified directorates like the Bureau of Yards and Docks
(Civil Engineering), Construction, Equipment and Repairs
(Ship Building), Ordnance and Hydrography (weapons), and
Medicine and Surgery…

On 11 September 1942, Pharmacist’s Mate First Class (PhM1/c)
Wheeler B. Lipes agonized over the most difficult decision of
his life. He had just diagnosed his shipmate, Seaman First
Class Darrel D. Rector, with acute appendicitis. With their
submarine Seadragon (SS-194) cruising in enemy waters, there
was no way to get Rector to port in […]…

On September 2, 1944 Lieutenant Junior Grade George Herbert
Walker Bush, then a pilot with Torpedo Squadron Fifty-One
(VT-51 ) assigned to the USS San Jacinto (CVL-30) , flew a
bombing mission against a Japanese radio station on Chichi
Jima. Despite his TBM Avenger being struck by heavy
anti-aircraft fire before reaching the target, Lt.(jg) Bush
[…]…

The invasion of South Korea in 1950 nearly resulted in a
Communist victory. UN forces were driven into a perimeter
around the southeastern port of Pusan when General of the
Army Douglas MacArthur, commanding U.S. and UN forces in
Korea, decided to launch an amphibious landing against the
North Korean flank at Inchon. A successful […]…

One of the questions asked today on Ask a Curator day on
Twitter was: Q: Interested to know if the curators have a
favourite piece, or does it change with each new exhibition?
Our curators came up with a lot of different answers: Jessie:
I love Middleton VC’s service dress uniform for the personal
connection. […]

September 1, 1862 – Union and Confederate forces clash at the
Battle of Chantilly. Seeking to take advantage of his victory
at Second Manassas, Gen. Robert E. Lee ordered Maj. Gen.
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (right) to take his command on a
flanking march to cut off Maj. Gen. John Pope’s retreat.
Pausing at Ox Hill, near Chantilly, on September 1, Jackson
was soon alerted to the approach of Union troops from the
south. Led by Brig. Gen. Isaac Stevens, this force attacked
Jackson late that afternoon. In heavy fighting, Stevens was
killed before his men fell back. The battle was soon…

You only need to drive around Britain to understand the
tragedy of the First World War, ‘The Great War’. It seems
that every little town and community has a memorial to the
young men who went off to war and never returned. But what
happens, some ninety years later, when these memorials begin
crumble or rot away?…

Saturday is the day that the new New Statesman and Nation
comes out. (The Spectator comes out on Friday, but I missed
that yesterday. Not to worry; there’s always next week.) It’s
a ‘week-end review’, not a newspaper, but inevitably has much
commentary on the war, generally from a left-wing
perspective. Indeed, this week it opens (197) with an
editorial comment (probably by Kingsley Martin) entitled ‘The
war in the air’. This war is evolving, from mass daylight
raids to small night raids: GERMAN tactics have changed once
more. Blitzkrieg methods were no proving too costly in
relation…

With the 148th anniversary of the battle approaching, I
thought I would share these images of the Ox Hill (Chantilly)
Battlefield. The first was taken over twenty years ago (1987,
I think), when I was taking an undergraduate Civil War course
at Northern Virginia Community College with Charles Poland.
At the time West […]…

August 27 marked the anniversary of the DSV Alvin-2 rescue by
Reynolds’ Aluminaut, an experimental deep sea exploration
submarine. Watch this educational film made by the Reynolds
Aluminum Co. here on NavyTV….

Interestingly, after yesterday’s coordinated pro-bombing
campaign, today’s headlines in The Times (4) emphasise the
efforts of Bomber Command over those of Fighter Command. In
particular, a raid on Berlin on Wednesday night (or Thursday
morning) is described in some detail. A ‘large number of
bombs, high explosive and incendiary’ were dropped ‘on a
series of carefully selected military objectives and on works
vital to war production’, including a power station and
railway yards. A pair of squadrons made a ‘special attack’ on
an (unspecified) objective just four miles from Berlin’s
centre. A number of the aircrew (all of whom…

Today we’re reading The Times. London was again menaced by
German bombers last night, though it seems bombs fell only on
the ‘outskirts’ (4), in particular ‘one bomb’ hit ‘a building
in the outskirts of London’. Folkestone was much harder hit
by a daytime raid in which ‘German bombers swooped out of the
sun […] people saw the bombs leaving the racks as the
raiders dived to within a few hundred feet of the roof tops’.
Three people were killed, laundry workers all. British
fighters chased the bombers (‘believed to be Messerschmitt
Jaguar bomber-fighters’) out over the Channel, claiming
three…

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